By DENNIS BOUNDS / KING 5 News
SEATTLE - You may have heard recent warnings about protecting your private information
when either selling or dumping your old computer.
It could be as risky as throwing away your wallet with all your credit cards and personal ID inside.
Is there a foolproof way to make sure that data disappears?
You may have wanted to do this to your computer at one time or another... But it may actually be a good idea if you're about to replace it with a bigger, better model.
"Your personal data is at risk when somebody resells a machine," according to Mark McLaughlin, of Computer Forensics International.
KING
Available software makes it easy for people to recover deleted files.
Just ask Todd Baitsholts. He had an old computer he wanted to give to charity.
First, he reformatted the hard drive; then he reinstalled Windows.
"We hope to erase all the data and not have it accessible to anyone," he said.
But after Baitsholts let computer expert Kevin Kranz take a look at his machine, it turns out there were several directories that still had information on them.
They contained old invoices and financial data, a treasure trove for someone who might have identity theft on his mind.
"It took me about 35 to 40 minutes to get this data," Kranz said.
The list of recovered files takes up pages and pages.
Says McLaughlin, "a file is never really deleted until it's overwritten, and that's a very fundamental issue in computer forensics."
McLaughlin sounded the alarm after he tested eight hard drives purchased at second hand shops around the country.
"We found some unbelievable things: credit card numbers, Social Security numbers of celebrities."
Even at a graveyard for government computers, three discarded hard drives selected at random and tested contained a lot of recoverable information.
So, how can you protect your data? Reformatting doesn't do it.
"It makes the file inactive. But the file contents are still there," McLaughlin said.
And while erasing data magnetically helps scramble the files, even that isn't fool proof.
"What they should do first is they should wipe the drive."
You can buy software that scans the disc and bit by bit overwrites the old data, replacing the important stuff with frivolous numbers. But you have to do it as many as 20 times.
The software costs about $40, but the best method for making that data disappear, according to McLaughlin, is both free and easy.
"What I recommend is taking the drive out of the machine and taking a drill and running a drill through it several times."
A hammer will work as well.
Police and computer forensics experts use software costing thousands of dollars to recover data.
But simpler software is available in computer stores, making it possible for just about anyone to be able to see deleted files hidden on the hard drive.
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